Promenade?

Today at the Pfister there were five marvelous maidens and two dapper dandies preparing to promenade. I observed much fluffing and adjusting of sequined petticoats that resemble floor-length tutus. Their parents were there too, health but in a separate camera flash filled cluster. Initially, I was planning on just walking past them all, but then realized that it was impossible to just walk past them without also immortalizing myself inside of some stranger’s prom portrait. So instead, I got out my camera and took my first picture.

The picture was of Tara and Carl, both juniors at South Milwaukee High School. They met because Tara likes hanging out with the hockey players, and Carl is a hockey player. They are in a long-term relationship, having been dating for six months now. Carl asked Tara to prom by scrawling in the dirt of her car: “Will you go to prom with THIS guy?” Along with this question he also included an arrow that pointed to the roof of her car where he sat atop, waiting to see what her response would be below. She answered by buying him a pair of new tennis shoes and including this note: “I am so glad you walked into my life, sole will you kick it at prom?”

While Tara and her fellow females got the majority of the parental paparazzi fuss (posing in various formations on the staircase), the two fellas stood out of the picture looking, frankly, dejected. The shorter one wondered aloud when he could get a turn to be included in a staircase shot. After talking to him a bit I learned that he is a freshman and therefore lucky to even be dressed up for prom along with the others. Freshman can only attend prom if a junior or senior asks them out. London, a junior asked him out “with noodles.” He’s known London his whole childhood, they grew up together. One day she arranged her pasta dinner into a one-word question, “PROM?” and texted a picture of it to him. He says he looks forward tonight to grooving-and-a-moving.

Tara & Carl

Now, a brief note from Anja Notanja: Hello! I am your new Pfister narrator. I am sole delighted and frambibulated to have promenaded into this new & spangled vocation. I do not know what all is actually going happen as your narrator, so if I were to write another sentence after this one I’d probably just be fibbing something up. Dingal zingo mumuti florex!